Dev blog · 1 November 2026
Giving every unit a voice
In IRON GRID every unit answers you over the radio, in its own language and with its own radio procedure. This entry covers how that works, and the soundboard at the end has every line the game ships.
Five radio nets, one voice per role
Each nation has its own cast: US English, Canadian English, Québécois French, German and French. Around a quarter of Canadian units speak French. Within a nation every role has one voice: the infantry section leader, the vehicle commander, the battery's fire direction centre, the helicopter crew and the pilot. When you select a Leopard platoon you always hear the same tank commander, slightly pitch-shifted per vehicle so two platoons don't sound like twins.
Procedure follows the real thing. German crews answer „Hört, kommen“ and say Zwo for two. NATO jet pilots speak English brevity in their own accent, so a Luftwaffe pilot still calls Fox Two, while German and French helicopter crews talk to the ground in their own language. Weapon calls match what was actually released: Rifle for an air-to-ground missile, Magnum for an anti-radiation shot, Pickle for bombs, Guns for the cannon and Splash for a kill. Polish and Russian nets follow once their translations are reviewed.
Calm, stressed, panicked
Most events come in three deliveries. A fresh unit is calm and clipped. Under fire it switches to stressed takes. Once it's pinned, routing, down to 40 % of its men, heavily suppressed, disabled or burning, you get the panicked takes: breathless, shouted, sometimes cut off mid-word. Beyond acknowledging orders, units report on their own: contacts by direction, armor or aircraft spotted, casualties, low ammo, reloading, and kill confirmations by target type.
Keeping it from getting annoying
Only one voice talks at a time, and alerts outrank orders, which outrank selection chatter. Every unit shuffles its variants, so a line doesn't repeat until the others have played. If you click the same squad over and over, it drops to a terse Roger. Callsigns like Falke Zwo-Eins are spliced in front of only 5–10 % of lines, and they appear on the unit cards too.
How the lines are made
Every line is rendered offline with ElevenLabs text-to-speech from per-nation lexicons, then transcribed back with speech-to-text. Takes the transcription doesn't match get re-rendered, so mishearings like Roger coming out as Rover never ship. The game plays the clips from a manifest through a radio filter with squelch; nothing is generated at runtime.